ABSTRACT
Since 1998 the Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer*/acollaboration of the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries*/has documented the undue burden of breast cancer for women of colour. In 1998 deaths from breast cancer were 28 per cent higher for black women than for white women.1 In fact, African-American women have the highest breast cancer
mortality rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States.2 Moreover, although overall rates for breast cancer are lower than for Whites, rates for breast cancer among young black women are higher and have been so for some time. As epidemiologist Nancy Krieger has observed: ‘Combine relatively high incidence and relatively high mortality, and the net result is that US Black women have among the highest breast cancer mortality rates in the world.’3
